Flashback Fridays: TMNT 3: Mutant Nightmare (Xbox)

Welcome to another installment of Flashback Fridays. For those of you who are unfamiliar with what’s going on here, please refer to previous articles for more information. Today we are going to continue our four part series on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games from my past. The title that I am going to talk about was the third installment of games based on the 2003 cartoon series for the Xbox ( as well as for a few other systems), TMNT 3: Mutant Nightmare.

Unlike their predecessors, the newer cartoon incarnation of the turtles did not fair so well in the video game department. Their first entry was playable but boring, and the second game was hindered by a terrible camera and, for some strange reason, a energy bar that all players shared together. In 2005, a third title was released called Mutant Nightmare, which improved upon many of the issues from their other adventures, but ultimately ended up being nothing more than a mediocre beat em up with no flair at all whatsoever. Despite these issues, this was still my favorite game out of the whole series, and is something I do enjoy playing every once in awhile to relive the good old days.

As I have stated before, these games don’t require a story explanation for obvious reasons. All you need to know is that a number of different enemies are trying to destroy the world, and it’s up to our heroes in a half shell to stop them. Nothing is different about the gameplay either, just beat up as many people as possible until you reach the end of a stage, and that’s it. Now back to my story.

One of the big changes that made this game better than previous entries in the series was that everybody had their own life meter. Another major improvement was the camera, as it was now centered around the turtles, which made it much easier to navigate through each stage. The in game objectives were a little more complicated this time around also, especially when it came to trying to complete the free battle area stages, because they were a nightmare in their own right. The worst of these was free battle area number seven. For some reason I couldn’t wrap my head around how to complete it, and then just to add insult to injury, my girlfriend figured out how to finish the stage, which made me feel even worse, but hey, we got through to the end together, and that’s all that matters.

TMNT 3: Mutant Nightmare was a valiant effort to try to make a video game experience as enjoyable as the old TMNT games, but ultimately it ended up being just another average experience that most people will forget right after they play it. If you are a curious fan, give this title a try, otherwise just leave it alone.

That concludes my story onTMNT 3: Mutant Nightmarefor Xbox, but if you have any fond (or bad) memories of this game please feel free to share them with us in the comments below.